Is an Angoff Standard an Indication of Minimal Competence of Examinees or of Judges

Background To establish credible, defensible and acceptable passing scores for written tests is a challenge for health profession educators. Angoff procedures are often used to establish pass/fail decisions for written and performance tests. In an Angoff procedure judges’ expertise and professional skills are assumed to influence their ratings of the items during standard-setting. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of judges’ item-related knowledge on their judgement of the difficulty of items, and second, to determine the stability of differences between judges.